Monday, Monday, can't trust that day!

Monday July 27

It’s so difficult getting started again after a day off. Lewis would have been happy had we decided to spend the remainder of our trip here, so long as an occasional visit to Walmart could be arranged. I would have liked an extra day off to rest my weary legs, but it’s not in the books. Donna has grumbled a bit lately about calling it quits as well. We’ve come too far and endured too many hardships to just cut this trip short by a month. Where would we be today if Christopher Columbus had a ships mate who was tired of sailing and wanted to go home to his soft bed? Why we’d be in bloody England, that’s where!

So we do eventually get packed up and head off from our church basement. We have another package that’s going back to Shelton. This time we have a big book full of pictures of Washington that a guy at the church gave us yesterday afternoon. In addition, we’ve packed up our rain pants, which we will no longer need for keeping us warm when it rains. From here on out, if it rains we’ll get wet. Cuz we’d get just as wet with those rainpants on anyways. Our warm socks that we bought for the cold nights have gone home as well. We’ve been sleeping on top of our sleeping bags more so than insided them so warm socks at night are no longer needed. A couple more of the maps have been returned. We’re down to our final 4 sections while we started with 13. Lewis returned another transformer per his usual agreement. Donna had a couple of widgets that she’d been dragging around that we weren’t going to use so those too are gone. The actual amount of weight that we shed by sending this stuff home is minimal, probably something like 2% of the total weight of all the things that are strapped to the bikes. But it’s made room for us to pack more efficiently!

The weather today is just plain hot. By the time we are pedaling away from the church (10:00) it’s already in the upper 80’s with stifling humidity. But we are determined and dedicated bikers so we laugh at adversity, we chuckle when fate throws rocks at us, and we scream in delight at thunderstorms! And speaking of thunderstorms, the hazy cloudy day quickly transforms into a threatening day as morning turns into afternoon while we are steadily putting miles between us and the Zion Lutheran Church of Hutchinson. The ominous clouds that had been building on the horizon, now appear just to the left of us and are challenging us to a contest. Do you think you can beat me? Do you want to race? they question. We chose to race, so we took off. Today’s race was only 7 miles and this time, we won! Barely. Newton was the prize as we pedaled into town, found the llibrary to do some wifi stuff and waited to see how the storms would respond to us having beaten them to town. This time they sulked; with barely a few sprinkles, they retreated and left town. But we had already decided that this was far enough as a city park with a pool was available. Todays ride : 40 miles.